1-6 Toward a Bilingual Metaphor

This course explores the brain bases of bilingualism by discussing literature relevant to differences in age of initial learning, proficiency, and control in the nonverbal, single language and dual-language literature. Participants will learn about the latest research related to how humans learn one or two languages and other cognitive skills.

教學方

Arturo E. Hernandez

腳本

[NOISE] So the first time I went to meet my doctoral advisor, Elizabeth Bates I began to speak to her about bilingualism. And, of course, this was not shortly after I'd returned from Brazil, maybe a couple of years after I returned from Brazil. And I still had this memory of these sort of two languages kind of working to try to settle with the introduction of a third language. And it reminded of a an episode of Star Trek, the really old the original Star Trek right. It's called the Alternative Factor, right. And in this episode of course, Captain Kirk is flying through space with you know, all the other crew and they encounter this they, they, they encounter this phenomenon where the universe seems to wink and they determine that the winking is coming from the ship. And then the ship is this man called Lazarus who claims that there's an alternative universe. In which the anti Lazarus comes in and comes out of and has destroyed his entire race. And that he's bent on destroying the anti Lazarus. Now because it's Star Trek, right, they could travel between these universes, and so Captain Kirk went and met with the anti Lazarus and discovers with the anti-Lazurus that, in fact, it's not true. He never killed Lazurus' entire race. Lazurus is just crazy and he doesn't care. He wants to destroy the anti-Lazarus, even if he destroys the two universes. So the only place that they can meet with no repercussions is inside the ship. It's a conduit between the two universes. So they hatch a plan, Lazarus draws anti Lazarus into the ship right. Captain Kirk destroys the ship sealing the conduit and Lazarus and anti Lazarus are locked into, in this battle for their entire lives. And I mentioned this to Elizabeth Bates, a little bit scared, because I thought, well God, that's, you know, this confrontation between the two languages. But she got it right away. She understood. She, herself, had learned Italian as an adult, and she had experienced this conflict between the two languages. This interference, right? And to me that was a very different metaphor, different feeling for how we could describe language and, and over the years I thought about in different ways. One idea I thought was maybe it's like a planetory, a planetary metaphor right? So you know if we thought about language as a planet and we thought about new language as a planet well you know when they collide that creates, you know, that's what happens when, you know, somebody learns a new language. And I thought, well, that's not a very good metaphor. I mean, that would create space dust, and we don't really want to say that people, when they learn a new language, lose their entire ability to use anything else, right? So as I thought about it more, I really thought that a biological metaphor made more sense, right? After all. Right. Learning is a biological process. Right. Language is in its essence a biological process. It's a product of the brain and of our bodies, and of combining biological entities in real time. So we can think about language and bilingualism within a biological view. Right, we could think of two languages, maybe not as a Lazarus and anti-Lazarus, but we can think of them as two species within the same eco-system, right? They're working together sometimes, sometimes at odds. They have to share resources, right? Sometimes they fight for resources. And so that give and take between those two species in an ecosystem, to me seems like a more natural metaphor to describe the types of things that people experience in their day to day lives when they speak more than one language. And in this course, we'll work through and consider the three topics. You know, when you learn a language, how well you speak it, and the control that's needed to go from one language to the other. And as we move along, I want you to keep in mind that the idea is that it's a biological process, you know? That's why we're studying the brain. But we can think of the act of learning two languages as having very similar properties to two species in an ecosystem